The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  “Right,” she said, hoping to sound more confident than she felt.

  She watched with her heart in her throat as Kieran leaned into the yawning shaft and grabbed the top rung of the ladder. He swung his long legs onto a rung below and hung on with one hand while yanking at the wires that sprouted from the maintenance panel. Sparks shot out, making him cover his face with his forearm.

  Down below, the light in the elevator car went out.

  “Come on,” he said, holding a hand out for Olivia to grasp.

  With only one good arm, she was unable to hold onto the edge of the door while reaching for that top rung. She just had to go for it, and hope she didn’t miss and tumble to her death.

  Kieran gripped her shoulder, steadying her. She was able to grab the top rung, but then her center of balance shifted and she had no choice but to follow-up with her legs.

  She crashed into him, her feet slipping so that she dangled for a brief, terrifying moment by her one hand. Kieran hooked his arm under her armpits and squeezed her broken ribs so tightly she had to bite back a scream.

  “I got you!” he said, his breath coming fast. “Hang on, Liv.”

  She peddled her bare feet in the air before her toes found a lower rung on the ladder. For nearly a minute, all she could do was hang on and try to get her panicked heartbeat under control.

  “Are you sure you can make it?” Kieran asked, still clinging to her.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Olivia rasped, gripping that rusty rung with white knuckles and trying not to look down. She didn’t want him to know how scared and wobbly she felt.

  “Here,” he said, climbing down until he was holding onto the rung at her waist level. That placed his arms around her on either side. “Go down one, and then I’ll go down one, like this. That way, if you slip, I’ll catch you.”

  Olivia smiled and shook her head. If she slipped again, they were probably both going to plunge to their deaths, but it was sweet of him to offer.

  They’d worked their way down two floors, and it actually seemed like they were going to make it, when armed security guards appeared in the open doorway. They shouted, then started shooting at them.

  “Jesus!” Kieran said, flinching and burying his face in the small of her back.

  She cringed, tucking her face down and involuntarily trying to move her broken arm to cover her head as a bullet ricocheted off the concrete just inches from her cheek. She only succeeded in banging the cast against a metal rung, sending a shooting pain up to her shoulder.

  They were easy targets.

  Olivia’s entire body was clenched and ready for a bullet when she heard Doctor Lansen’s voice echo down the shaft.

  “Are you insane?” he asked. “Stop! I need her alive, you idiots!”

  The shots stopped. The shouting ended, and almost immediately the voices were gone altogether.

  Kieran and Olivia had to get to the bottom of this shaft and fast.

  48

  “Go,” she hissed.

  After what seemed like forever on the spindly ladder, they finally reached the roof of the elevator car. The only light came from high above, so Olivia and Kieran had to get down on their hands and knees and feel around the filthy, grease-caked roof before they found the maintenance hatch.

  More precious time passed before they could find the pull ring and get their grubby fingers under the edges of the hatch to lift it open. Kieran sat on the lip of the opening with his legs dangling into the car, and then lowered himself down.

  “Come on!” he said, his disembodied voice rising from the pitch-black interior of the car. “I’ll catch you.”

  Olivia had no idea where he was, but she sat down on the edge of the opening just like he had, lowering her legs into the darkness. She felt his hands gripping her calves as she slid forward. It wasn’t until his hands slid up to grip her bare hips beneath her hospital gown that she remembered she didn’t have on any underwear.

  She’d never been so happy it was dark.

  She slid down into his arms until her feet touched the elevator floor. There was a thin sliver of light coming from the crack in the elevator doors, and Olivia could just barely make out the silhouette of Kieran’s shaggy head, just inches from hers. He held on for a moment, and she could feel her heart racing.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said, gently pulling away. “We need to figure out where we are.”

  “This should let us out in the underground parking garage where I left the truck,” Kieran said, struggling to pry the elevator doors part of the way open. “Based on how far down we’ve climbed.”

  It didn’t.

  Instead, they found another bland white hallway almost exactly like the one they’d left up on the third floor.

  “Is this the bottom of the shaft?” Olivia asked. “Or are there other floors beneath this one?”

  There hadn’t been any other doors in the shaft, on the way down, so it was impossible to count how many floors they’d passed.

  “I don’t know,” Kieran replied, squinting back up through the open hatch, and then over at the control panel. “There are only two buttons, and they’re both unmarked. This has to be the basement level... I think.”

  “Well, we can’t climb back up,” Olivia said. “And we can’t stay in here.”

  “Right,” Kieran said, forcing the reluctant steel doors the rest of the way open. “Come on.”

  As soon as they were through, and Kieran let go of the doors, they snapped shut like an angry mouth. Standing in the hallway, they scanned their surroundings. The elevator was at one end, and at the far end stood a heavy steel security door with an electronic keypad. Smaller, less imposing doors lined the hall.

  The two of them ran for the security door and Olivia pressed her ear against the cool surface, listening, while Kieran messed around with the key card.

  “Can you open it?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t take a card,” he said. “It requires some kind of code.” He pulled a Swiss army knife from the pocket of his cargo pants. “But, I think I can bypass it manually.”

  He used the stubby little knife to pry off the beige plastic cover of the keypad and started messing around with the wires beneath. Olivia stood by, tense and anxious.

  That’s when she noticed that the door to her right was open, just a crack. She pushed it open a little wider, to peer inside. As soon as she did, a sour, chemical stench wafted out, like ammonia and spoiled milk and dissected frogs in biology class.

  She flipped on a light and found what appeared to be a small morgue. Stainless-steel drawers lined the far wall. Several steel gurneys were parked along the left side of the room, one empty and the rest occupied by black vinyl body bags.

  She told herself that there was nothing weird about a morgue in a hospital basement. But shapes inside the body bags seemed all irregular, and disturbingly proportioned. Some seemed to sag, causing the bag to appear nearly empty, while others looked ready to burst at the seams.

  Stepping into the room, Olivia couldn’t bring herself to go near the body bags, but she was curious enough to try the doors on some of the large metal cabinets, thinking she might find a scalpel or something she could use as a weapon. She instantly regretted this decision when she revealed row after row of specimen jars.

  Some contained organs, or other unidentifiable lumps of tissue, but most contained what appeared to be an extensive collection of fetuses. Not the normal kind, though.

  There were fetuses with massive, fragile heads like gray aliens, and fetuses with low flat heads like crocodiles. One in particular that caught her eye had no features at all—just a red, fleshy blossom like a carnation where the head should have been.

  This is a research hospital, she said to herself. They study genetic defects. It’s completely reasonable for them to have a collection like this.

  Yet why were they down here in the morgue, and not in a lab? They couldn’t all be recently deceased? Could they?

  Olivia backed o
ut of the room and pressed close to Kieran.

  “How much longer?” she asked.

  “I’m trying,” he replied. “Almost there...”

  There were no sounds coming from the other side of the locked door, but Olivia could hear sounds coming from behind the doors that lined the hallway. Soft—barely more than whispers at first, but becoming louder and more agitated. Scraping and scuffling. Staccato thumps. Low, garbled voices that didn’t sound like English. A sound that may or may not have been crying.

  That’s when Olivia noticed that none of the doors had knobs.

  “Kieran,” she said. “We need to get the hell out of here... now.”

  Then they heard someone scrabbling around behind the elevator doors at the opposite end of the hallway.

  “Someone’s coming!” she hissed.

  Kieran wiped sweat from his eyes with his jacket sleeve and continued to work, swearing under his breath and pleading with the wires like he could sweet-talk them into doing what he wanted.

  The elevator doors scraped open a scant inch, then slammed back shut.

  “Hurry!” Olivia said.

  “Come on come on come on,” Kieran muttered, pulling one wire loose from its moorings, and then another.

  Then, suddenly, several things happened at once.

  Kieran crossed the wrong two wires, causing sparks to shoot out from the keypad, making him drop the knife and leap back.

  The lights flickered and went out—then a harsh, stark, white emergency lamp over the door clicked on, throwing jagged shadows across the walls and ceiling.

  The door to the stairway remained stubbornly closed, but all along the hallway, the other doors slid slowly open.

  49

  For a seemingly endless moment, nothing happened. No drooling maniacs came tearing out of their cells. No armed guards. Nothing.

  Then a familiar voice.

  “Smooth move, Exlax.”

  Annie, stepping out of the shadows at the far end of the hall.

  Olivia strode down the hall toward her, fists clenched and ready to let her have it. Kieran was right behind.

  “What the hell do you want?” Olivia hissed.

  “I’ve had it with this place,” Annie said. “I want out. Take me with you.”

  “Why did you tell the doctor about me?” Kieran asked. “We could have made it to the stairway, if you hadn’t given us away.”

  “I thought...” Her voice caught, and she looked down. “I thought I could make him love me. But he doesn’t. He never will.”

  Olivia stepped forward in front of Kieran.

  “Why should we trust you?” she asked.

  “You can’t, I guess,” Annie said. “I wouldn’t trust me.”

  She shrugged, chewing at a torn bit of skin on the edge of a ragged fingernail, and looked away.

  Olivia frowned.

  “We can’t just leave her here with that crazy bastard.”

  “Why not?” Kieran asked. “I really don’t think...”

  “Something’s coming out of that door,” Annie interrupted, eyes wide and pointing back toward the exit.

  “Where?” Olivia asked, squinting against the glare of the emergency lamp.

  “There,” Kieran said. “Second door on the left.”

  Sure enough, there was something. Something small and white, low down near the bottom of the doorframe.

  A hand.

  A child’s hand.

  A little blond girl came toddling out from the doorway. She was maybe three years old, with big, scared eyes, naked except for a plastic hospital wristband. She was dirty and shivering and seemed wretchedly thin. She turned toward Olivia and held out her scrawny little arms, silently pleading to be picked up.

  Olivia suddenly flashed back to another little girl, scared and confused, not understanding what was being done to her.

  “Jesus,” she said, taking a step toward the child.

  “What is going on in this place?” Kieran asked.

  “I thought I knew,” Annie said. “But now...”

  “It’s okay, honey,” Olivia said, squatting down and holding out her arms. “It’s okay, come here.”

  The little girl took a few wobbly steps, then fell back on her bottom and started crying.

  That’s when something else appeared from the doorway opposite from the morgue. Something that was not a little girl.

  50

  Olivia had an impression of a very tall, pale, morbidly obese person with no hair. But as the person turned toward them, it became clear that what looked like rolls of fat were actually fluctuating waves of flesh that moved like molten wax over that abnormally massive frame.

  There was also something very wrong in the loose, rubbery, double-jointed way those long arms and legs moved.

  “Becky?” Annie said, frowning. “What happened to you? We thought you were dead.”

  “Becky” cocked her big, lumpy, stone-idol head and then lunged toward the child. Dozens of greasy red tumors erupted like mushrooms along the inside of her long, reaching arms, blossoming into bouquets of jagged, translucent teeth.

  Before those grasping, abnormal hands reached the wide-eyed toddler, the steel door at the end of the corridor opened, causing Becky to whip around to face it.

  A brace of four guards in security uniforms came through. Olivia’s eye went straight to the unfamiliar rifle in the lead man’s hands, and she quickly realized that it was actually some kind of air gun, like the kind used to dart large animals.

  Becky’s attention also went right to the gun. She let out a bizarre, inhuman wail that sounded like it had passed over more than one set of vocal cords on the way out. She lurched forward and grabbed the man’s head with one hand. The fingers on that hand suddenly doubled and then tripled in number, the impossible new digits long and fleshless, with hooked tips that pierced easily through the screaming victim’s skull.

  With a flick of her wrist, she flung the body in their direction. Olivia shoved Kieran toward the wall, shielding him as the guard flew past them and landed upside-down and crumpled against the elevator door.

  The other men fell back into the stairwell visible on the other side of the door, and opened fire with a variety of sidearms.

  Bullets pinged off the tiles and took chunks out of doorframes all around her, but Olivia didn’t even stop to think about her own safety. She just ran over and grabbed the terrified child, then ducked into one of the open doors and out of the line of fire.

  Seconds later, Annie dove through the same door, with Kieran in tow.

  Taking a quick look around the room they were in, Olivia saw that it was an empty hospital room, the bed sheetless and bare.

  “Block the door!” Olivia said, protectively cradling the clinging child against her chest.

  “Help me tip up this bed!” Annie said to Kieran.

  The two of them worked together to wedge the heavy old-fashioned bed frame into the doorway.

  Suddenly, the shooting out in the hallway just stopped.

  “Now what the hell are we supposed to do?” Annie asked.

  “There’s no way out,” Kieran whispered, his jittery gaze all over the featureless dimensions of the small room. He looked pale and terrified, a thin sheen of sweat on his anxious face. Olivia needed to keep him calm, to avoid too much stress on his heart.

  “Stay frosty,” she said, borrowing one of his little catchphrases. “Look there.”

  She gestured at the right-hand wall, which seemed to be hinged in several places, as if it was retractable.

  “Another elevator?” Kieran asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But I do think we might be able to slide it open and go through into the next room.”

  Annie ran to the edge of the dividing wall and started running her fingers over the surface, looking for some kind of latch or lock.

  “Then what?” Kieran said.

  “Climb back up the elevator shaft?” Annie suggested.

  “Even if that was a good
idea—which I’m not sure it is,” he responded, “Olivia will have a hard time climbing back up with her broken arm. Especially carrying that little boy.” Kieran turned back to Olivia, holding out his arms. “Here, let me carry him.”

  Olivia frowned, looking down at the toddler in her arms. The girl stuck her thumb in her mouth and turned her head, laying it against Olivia’s shoulder.

  “Kieran,” she said, hand on the child’s back. “She’s a girl, not a boy.”

  He frowned.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “I mean, last time I checked, girls don’t have...” He gestured at the naked child. “You know.”

  Olivia held the child away from her body, looking her over. What the hell was Kieran talking about?

  “You’re on crack, dude,” Annie said over her shoulder, still searching for a way to open the wall. “She’s a girl. In fact, she looks just like me when I was that age. And I certainly don’t have...” She smirked at Kieran. “You know.”

  Olivia looked at Annie, with her black hair and dark eyes, then back at the child. The child had blond hair and green eyes.

  Just like Olivia.

  She felt a cold flush of fear in her belly.

  “Something is wrong here,” she said, slowly putting the child down on the floor and backing away.

  “Is he...” Kieran said. “Or she... I don’t know. Controlling our minds? Making us see her... differently?”

  “For that matter,” Annie said, “What does she, or he, really look like.”

  And at that moment, the fragile glamour around the child shattered, peeling back like a shed skin and revealing the face beneath.

  51

  The child had a large, pale cloven head with two distinct lobes and a deep crease between them. Its shrunken, bony torso was no bigger than a soda can and its long, insectoid limbs seemed too weak and spindly to support the weight of its huge, spatulate tree-frog hands and feet.

  The face seemed almost vestigial, like the face of cave-dwelling fish that had never seen the sun. Its tiny, slitted eyes were solid matte black, with no visible distinction between white, iris, and pupil. There were three identical slits in the lower face that looked like the watertight nostrils of a marine mammal, though one of them had to be a mouth of some kind. All three were crusted with gummy discharge. Its grayish skin was covered with a pustulent rash and it smelled bad—fishy and rotten, but weirdly sweet too, like the dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant.